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The world’s tallest mountain is piled high with rubbish. But there is, in fact, a very simple solution.
And this is not a new problem. When my cousin Howard Somervell and the tragic George Mallory made the first attempt to climb Everest in 1922 they left behind them tents, food tins, oxygen bottles – and the bodies of seven Sherpas.
Following them to that same Tibetan side in 1990, my expedition was instructed to burn our own abandoned tents on the 23,000-foot North Col, but they wouldn’t catch fire. So we rolled them up into a large round bale together with our rubbish, sleeping bags, stoves and poo bags.
But the bale was too heavy to carry down on our descent, and so we came up with an ingenious plan: throw it down the mountain. We had sent our actor-climber Brian Blessed ahead of us down the snowy slope and could see his rotund figure below us, plodding gamely towards the lower camp like a hungry yeti.
Being careful to avoid him, we shoved the baggy orange bale downwards and watched as it gained speed. It went straight for a while, but then to our horror it started to curve towards our friend. Then it began to bounce, taking big leaps into the air and heading straight for him. “Brian! Brian!” we yelled in unison, “Look behind you!”
Brian, a pantomime veteran, ignored the cries and continued downwards. The speeding bale, taking one last huge leap, then exploded and showered him with stoves, dirty underwear and bagged faeces. Convinced this was a deliberate plot, he staggered back to his feet and shook his fist up at us, his face streaked with ordure, his lips working with rage. What he shouted at us cannot be repeated in a family newspaper, but it has stuck with me.
When I climbed the mountain from the Nepali side in 1993 the rubbish was so thick in the gravel moraine at Camp Two that it resembled the raisins in a fruit cake. There were sweet wrappers from the successful British 1953 climb, Japanese gas cannisters and Russian bottles. These will remain until the mountain washes into the sea.
On that expedition we wondered why there were dogs digging around the foot of the famous Khumbu Icefall. Then we found the half-eaten body of a climber. On summit day I saw five corpses in the snow. A friend of ours then added to that number after slipping and falling all the way down to the Khumbu Glacier. At least we were able to retrieve his body. We had to drag him down the Icefall in a sleeping bag.
One expedition leader used to clear bodies off the North Face route by nudging them over the edge. Seeing them was bad for customers’ morale, he said. Properly removing a corpse from the mountain takes half a dozen Sherpas, who loathe touching dead bodies. The sad little graveyard on the terminal moraine of the Rongbuk Glacier is enough to make most of us want to stay on the mountain should we perish.
When my expedition discovered the spread-eagled body of Mallory in 1999, they found all sorts of rubbish in his pockets: letters, a tailor’s bill, a watch, nail scissors, petroleum jelly and a tin of Brand & Co’s “Savoury Meat Lozenges”.
Many “clean-up” expeditions are merely excuses for cheap summit bids, and the clean-up itself is ignored once on the mountain. Back to that solution then: I have seen it in action.
In 2014, I climbed Mount Aconcagua – the highest peak in the southern hemisphere – with my friend Simon Calder (the king of travel journalism who has just moved to the Telegraph) and author Gina Waggott.
We were each handed numbered plastic bags. These, we were informed by the park rangers, were to defecate into. Other bags would contain our rubbish. At the end of our climb all of these were inspected by the same rangers.
On Everest, poo could be dropped into barrels and carried down the valley to be used as fertiliser for the following year’s crop of vegetables. This would entrain a Karmic cycle, as those salads would fuel the next wave of climbers. Meanwhile, Sherpas could be paid a bounty for each empty oxygen bottle retrieved.
Presently, Nepal’s ministry of tourism – which manages access to Everest – is allowing a wild west economy to flourish on the mountain. Commercial operators act with impunity, and cash is king. We need to let cash clean up Mount Everest.
Graham Hoyland is a mountaineer and writer. His latest book, First on Everest: The Life of Howard Somervell, is published by The History Press
There is a simple solution to Everest’s rubbish crisis
When I climbed Mount Aconcagua in 2014, there was a rigid waste disposal system in place